Exporting Facebook comments from Comments Box using xid and migrated=1

First published on June 20, 2013

If you’ve been using the Facebook Comments Box on your website for a few years, you might have gone through a migration in 2011 where you simply added a “migrated=1″ parameter as suggested by Facebook:

<fb:comments xid="[id_of_page]" migrated="1"></fb:comments>

As of July 10, 2013 they are completely dropping support for the “xid” parameter and requiring an “href” parameter. However, this means that if you “migrated” your comments in 2011, you are in danger of losing all existing comments. The Facebook documentation is silent on this issue and it seems like others are facing the same problem without a known solution. This was enough to finally move one of Mugo‘s clients away from Facebook comments (and specifically to Disqus).

Of course, moving away from Facebook comments means that you need a way to export your existing comments. This is possible with some guesswork, since the documentation doesn’t mention some legacy fields like “xid”, which are crucial to the export. I won’t go through the entire process of using the Facebook Graph API and FQL; there are plenty of tutorials around the general setup. In the example below, we’ll extract the text, author information, and time of each comment.

First, make sure that in your app settings within Facebook, Migration->July 2013 Breaking Changes is “Disabled” (thanks for Darius for the tip!).

Then, using the Graph API Explorer, you can perfect the exact query that you need:

Select your application in the top right, choose to do an FQL query, and then run a query on the “comment” table:

SELECT time, text, fromid FROM comment WHERE xid = 87902

Note that you do not need to use a “WHERE” clause specifying the “app_id” value — if you do, you will not get any results. It is your access token that already puts you in the scope of the correct application.

Basically, you’ll have to generate, from your website, a list of all the xid values (in other words, page IDs that could possibly have comments), and then pass it to Facebook. FQL supports passing multiple xid values with the “IN” syntax, so you can run a query like this:

SELECT xid, time, text, fromid FROM comment WHERE xid IN ( 87900, 87901, 87902, 87903, 87904 )

As shown in the screenshot above, you will get a JSON result with entries for each comment.

The “fromid” value is the Facebook user ID. For each result, you can directly call a Graph API REST URL to get information about the user’s name:

https://graph.facebook.com/[fromid]

This should yield a JSON result similar to this:

{
   "id": "883724954",
   "name": "Joe Smith",
   "first_name": "Joe",
   "last_name": "Smith",
   "link": "https://www.facebook.com/joesmith",
   "username": "joesmith",
   "gender": "male",
   "locale": "en_GB"
}

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This entry is filed under Blogs, Web development tutorials and written by Peter Keung. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.